Life Lived Forward
by sunshineditty
Summary: Cora's thoughts as the Hales leave Beacon HIlls after 3A


Cora is glad to put Beacon Hills in their rearview mirror. Going home again, when she heard the Hales were back on the Preserve, hadn't ended the way she thought it would. But she'd learned that life rarely went according to one person's plans and had rolled with it, despite Derek's shitty attempts at being an Alpha and Peter's creepy attitude. Derek might say their uncle was better before the fire but it doesn't feel that way when she can still feel Peter's assessing gaze between her shoulderblades. She only remembers him as a long lithe pale shadow of their mother with golden eyes; maybe he was better, when his anchor existed in the form of a cute beta and a pup. Cora will never know and doesn't really care.

She shifts restlessly in the passenger seat, tired of looking at her reflection in the night-darkened window as miles slide past unseen. Derek is driving with his foot to the floor as if he's afraid he won't be able to escape Beacon HIlls. Maybe he's right. The town has its hooks deep into Hale psyche, after all, a stretch of land ground into their bones and muscles, sitting behind the eyes in the deepest parts of their ancestral memories. Wolves are human and other, it's true, and their memories are more genetic than oral or written. It's hard to explain the ways they are different because it's not knowledge that is shared or discussed. They just are.

Derek must feel her gaze upon his face because he side-eyes her questioningly as if waiting for a command. Cora isn't sure what to think about him willingly giving up his red eyes to heal her. Like Peter, she doesn't remember Derek well because he was always Laura's creature and Cora was just the baby who clung to their mother's skirt. He smells like home, and pack, and weirdly enough, the Stilinskis. Not just the boy, but the father too, as if close proximity to them had seared their scents into him. There is really only one reason for him to carry them in his skin, and its not one she's eager to ask about. For all that Derek is trying to be open, any mention of the boy will surely blank his expression as it does whenever Stiles comes around.

The first time she suspected there was something between them was the evening Stiles came looking for Derek at the loft, then stayed to hear Peter's tale about Paige and the Alphas. Cora hadn't known the sordid details but it gelled with the faint memories she had around then when strange wolves had come into their territory, upsetting Talia with their actions and words. Even in her short acquaintance with the hyper active human, she is fully aware Stiles never hesitates to push for answers to his questions, so the fact he never followed through with asking Derek for his side of the story tells her more than she's comfortable knowing. How anyone could miss the burgeoning attraction between her brother and Stiles is a conundrum she has no intention of trying to figure out.

There is confusion and distrust between them too, of course, especially since Stiles still hasn't broken fully with Scott, but had Derek stayed in Beacon Hills instead of following her out, Cora has no illusions to the eventual conclusion to their relationship. You can't fight the moonlight, as the lyrics go, and they shouldn't even try.

"How far are we going?"

Fittingly these are the first words spoken in nearly three hours.

"As far as the road takes us," Derek quietly says, eyes engaged fully on the black tarmac before them., muscles clenching in his jaw. There is an echo to his words as if someone else is speaking through him, and Cora hears Laura threaded through the rough tone.

Cora wonders what it was like when her two siblings left Beacon Hills after the fire. She has little memory of her own flight, and no desire to reconstruct the journey that took her from the forest of northern California and ended with her in Washington state. She only cares that she found a pack willing to take her in despite her Omega status and empty memory.

Things have certainly changed yet remained the same somehow: Derek wasn't her Alpha then and isn't her beta now, despite their familial connection, so they are once again fugitives, landless and packless, except there is a thrumming sense of hope and expectancy as if life waits just over the next ridge.

Maybe this time will be different.

"Wake me when we get there."

* * *

**A/N: Title from Kierkegaard (Life is only understood backwards but must be lived forwards).**


End file.
